Blog/July 2019/Jul 26th
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This week our next-door neighbors moved out, and the new neighbors started sprucing up the place prior to moving in next week. It took us a while to train our former neighbors in proper noise-level etiquette; it seems like we’ll have to go through the same training process with the new ones. At least the old ones took away the hideous lion “statue” they had placed directly in our line-of-sight. <sigh>
In Israeli political news: it’s been another rough-and-tumble week. A new Leftist party sprang into being, led by the former (failed) PM Ehud Barak; his party has formed a tactical bloc with the far-Left Meretz party. On the Right, the “New Right” party rearranged things so Ayelet Shaked leads it. Good thing for them, since all polls have shown she’s by far the most popular potential leader of “parties to the right of the Likud”. And Bibi made noises about interfering with the unification of the Right-bloc, since they take votes away from Likud. It’s turning out to be an interesting race this time.
I took my Mom for another set of shots in her eyes, which she doesn’t suffer very quietly. The good news: the doctor is happy with her progress, and doubled the length of the period between shots. So now Mom can suffer more quietly, one can hope.
In “two-state” news: A pro-Israel Saudi blogger came to Israel. During his visit to the “Temple Mount” he was violently accosted. Not by Jews, not by the Israeli security forces, but by the Fakestinian riffraff. There’s a reason, apart from political considerations, that the Arab world in general doesn’t care for the Fakestinians.
My new motto: “Truth is not binary”. I was inspired to come up with this after many months of being inundated with statements like, “it’s her truth”, and “gender isn’t a binary”. Because I truly enjoy poking fun at self-righteous imbeciles, I decided to be brave and be bold and be woke: truth is not a binary!
Though it is, of course: a fact is either true or it isn’t. Nor, as Ben Shapiro famously and endlessly states, do facts care about your feelings. But we’re well on our way to maximal idiocy in public discourse, so I feel an obligation to contribute my fair share. You’re welcome.
Back in the geek world: I spent most of the week reworking the 8th manual. For reasons of convenience and output quality, I had written it in TeX, which allowed me to make an excellent PDF version of the documentation. But I’ve had several requests for a parallel HTML version of the documentation, and producing that from my TeX or PDF source was not easy nor was the result very good. So I laboriously created an ODT version in LibreOffice, and tried to make the formatting as close to the TeX version as reasonable.
In fact, I improved on the formatting in some regards. Now I have an ODT version of the manual, and can convert it to rather similar looking HTML from the comfort of my makefile. But it was indeed a painful process…
This week I attended the event in memory of Rabbi Yosef Qapaḥ in hopes of meeting up with friends I haven’t seen for a while. Unfortunately, I only saw two of my friends (seeing them was fortunate; not seeing the others was not). And more unfortunately, the lectures weren’t particularly interesting. The event started later than it was supposed to, and I need to eat within a certain time-frame, so I left partway through. At least I did get out of the house, so good on me!
PSA: if you want to eat corn-on-the-cob in Israel, the only brand to get is “Carmelim”. I’ve been made to suffer through years of virtually inedible corn here in the Land, because my Better Half™ likes corn on the cob even if it’s practically inedible. The “Carmelim” variety is (relatively) expensive, but it is truly delicious.
The weather has been just as you would expect summer in the Middle East to be. Nothing exciting to report on that front. It is supposed to be slightly cooler over shabbat.
This shabbat the three of us will feast upon:
homemade ḥalla,
baked chicken leg-quarters,
tortilla de papas (con aceite en lugar de manteca),
roasted beets,
garlicky green-beans,
various salatim,
fruit,
and ice-cream.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom!
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